How to Fix MIME Type Problems in Elgg 1.8

There has been a big problem for a while involving recognizing MIME types in elgg 1.8 This is due to the fact that the latest elgg release quietly requires php 5.3 to properly recognize MIME types as pointed out for one of our elgg users in our forum. For that reason in this article I will show you to fix this issue.

By default, all of our Linux accounts use of PHP 5.2 as not all scripts are compatible with PHP 5.3, but since elgg relies on php 5.3, we are going to do the following solution, which was extracted from one of our articles written by Ryan.

Open the .htaccess file of your elgg installation, and of the top of the file, add this line:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php53 .php

Save the changes. Then run upgrade.php and that’s it, now elgg is running under php 5.3